Well....as shadow suggested me somewhere else, I ll share my experience with the others about SoZ.
Firstly..I will say that I am playing nwn2 since its release so can compare how the proggress on the game was made. Tried both OC and MotB in cooperative multiplayer and it was rubbish, mainly dialogue system was just terrible, confusing and causing chaos if there were more than 2 players connected. I am playing this game on one PW since games release, so picked 3 of my friends from there and started playign SoZ with them and the experience so far is ....absolutely amazing.
The more open nature of SoZ compared to the previous sequels from the series is cool, however, there had to come drawback in NPC char companions not being that "deep" like they were in previous game (good comparsion is IWD vs BG wher SoZ is more IWD-ish), so by inviting 3 real players which actually can RP, I got rid of this slightly annoying thingie. The gaming system is much more multiplayer-campaign friendly than previous games, dialogue system is finally made clear, good looking and most importantly in small window, which helps the smoothness a LOT. Also, chars can type normally while you are thinking about your answers..adding some nice flaw and atmosphere by reacting to what NPCs says + all players can answer the NPC ..not just one, and dialogue options varies depending on chars bluff, diplomacy, intimidate etc...skills. Well done Obsidian on this !
Another thing I was interested in...how that "oh-so-stylish" and fresh Overland map will work in multiplayer and again, I was pleasantly surprised, party leader enters the overland map and can "give" the leadership to the other member of the party ..so basically if you are playing some char with bad spot,hide and MS, its good to give Overland leadership to your party rogue, who should have these skills as highest possible (avoiding most of the random encounters is rather nice..and you can always choose to attack them if you want in the end..). As I said, well done again.
Storywise I am pretty hooked up ..as I did not finish the game before starting the multiplayer, I am enjoying it a lot..my party members all finished it before ..but they dont spoil and adds nice atmosphere + another good thing about this is that they do not act so stupid in combat like AI usually does. Yes, still its NWN2 and Bugsidian, so everything is possible and AI ( from their experience) acted just wrong in many situations, so best bet if you are going to play it solo is to turn puppet mode on and handle the combats good ol' baldurs gate way where you have every move of your party members under your control. Except that, game is stable, smooth, they worked a bit on the crapiness of coding in the engine (but still shadows are _VERY_ performance consuming, mainly on ATI cards), so its not that power demanding like original nwn2 were.
So far (as I dont have finished game yet) I can give 8/10 as my personal rank, but maybe it will even improve after finishing it, as I really love to play the game currently. One of the best RPGs I have played this year so far. Great job Obsidian in finally bringing us _usable_ RPG from FR setting which allows entertaining experience even while playing with friends..thats how it should look from the beginning
. So as its pretty obvious from my reactions, I can only recommend buying this game, get bunch of good friends together play and enjoy!